anthropomorphic automobile antics

[jrtom]

Spotted on a couple of different websites:

http://uk.download.yahoo.com/ne/fu/oa/eurcncs185030.mpg

Update: an amateur version, with a "making of" webpage: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/msmith1015/VWVideo.htm

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Wonder how much they had to pay for permissions on that from the transformers people? It's pretty clearly based on old Autobot models...

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Well, Megan and I were discussing that last night. It's not clear to me that they had to pay anything. First, consider the existence of the GoBots. And, at this point, probably loads of other imitations. Perhaps the GoBot creators got their asses sued off and I never heard about it...but I'm really not sure how intellectual property works in this context. I'm pretty sure that you can't copyright the idea of cars transforming into robots and vice versa (copyrights usually have to be more specific than that) and they certainly can't patent it (cause, you know, the Transformer creators didn't actually know how to build one).

Anyone?